Botanically speaking, seeds are small embryonic plants--the whole plant stuffed into a tiny seed and surrounded by an outer layer packed with vitamins, minerals, and phytochemicals to protect the seedling plant's DNA from free radicals. No wonder they're so healthy. By seeds, using the formal definition, we're talking all whole grains; grains are seeds--you plant them and they grow. Nuts are just dry fruits with one or two seeds. Legumes (beans, peas, and lentils) are seeds, too, as are cocoa and coffee beans. So, finding health-promoting effects in something like cocoa or coffee should not be all that surprising. There is substantial evidence that increased consumption of all these little plants is associated with lower risk of cardiovascular disease.

Of course, much of chocolate research is just on how to get consumers to eat more. While it didn't seem to matter what kind of music people were listening to when it came to the flavor intensity, pleasantness, or texture of a bell pepper, people liked chocolate more when listening to jazz than classical, rock, or hip hop. Why is this important? So food industries can "integrate specific musical stimuli" in order to maximize their profits. For example, purveyors may play jazz in the background to increase consumers' acceptance of their chocolates. Along these lines, another study demonstrated that people rated the oyster eaten "more pleasant in the presence of the 'sound of the sea' than in the presence of 'farmyard noises.'"

You'd think chocolate would just sell itself, given that it's considered the most commonly craved food in the world. The same degree of interest doesn't seem to exist as to whether or not Brussels sprouts might provide similar cardiovascular protection. So, it's understandable to hope chocolate provides health benefits. Meanwhile, despite their known benefits, Brussels sprouts don't get the love they deserve.

One of the potential downsides of chocolate is weight gain, which is the subject of my Does Chocolate Cause Weight Gain? video. Though cocoa hardly has any calories, chocolate is one of the most calorie-dense foods. For example: A hundred calories of chocolate is less than a quarter of a bar, compared to a hundred calories of strawberries, which is more than two cups..

A few years ago, a study funded by the National Confectioners Association--an organization that, among other things, runs the website voteforcandy.com--reported that Americans who eat chocolate weigh, on average, four pounds less than those who don't. But maybe chocolate-eaters exercise more or eat more fruits and vegetables. The researchers didn't control for any of that.

The findings of a more recent study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine were less easy to dismiss and there were no apparent ties to Big Chocolate. The researchers reported that out of a thousand men and women they studied in San Diego, those who frequently consumed chocolate had a lower BMI--actually weighed less--than those who ate chocolate less often. And this was even after adjusting for physical activity and diet quality. But, it was a cross-sectional study, meaning a snapshot in time, so you can't prove cause and effect. Maybe not eating chocolate leads to being fatter, or maybe being fatter leads to not eating chocolate. Maybe people who are overweight are trying to cut down on sweets. What we need is a study in which people are followed over time.

There was no such prospective study, until now. More than 10,000 people were followed for six years, and a chocolate habit was associated with long-term weight gain in a dose-response manner. This means the greatest weight gain over time was seen in those with the highest frequency of chocolate intake. It appears the reason the cross-sectional studies found the opposite is that subjects diagnosed with obesity-related illnesses tended to reduce their intake of things like chocolate in an attempt to improve their prognosis. This explains why heavier people may, on average, eat less chocolate.

To bolster this finding came the strongest type of evidence--an interventional trial--in which you split people up into two groups and change half their diets. Indeed, adding four squares of chocolate to peoples' daily diets does appear to add a few pounds.

So, what do we tell our patients? In 2013, researchers wrote in the American Family Physician journal that "because many cocoa products are high in sugar and saturated fat, family physicians should refrain from recommending cocoa...." That's a little patronizing, though. You can get the benefits of chocolate without any sugar or fat by adding cocoa powder to a smoothie, for example. Too often, doctors think patients can't handle the truth. Case in point: If your patients inquire, one medical journal editorial suggest, ask them what type of chocolate they prefer. If they respond with milk chocolate, then it is best to answer that it is not good for them. If the answer is dark chocolate, then you can lay out the evidence.

Botanically speaking, seeds are small embryonic plants--the whole plant stuffed into a tiny seed and surrounded by an outer layer packed with vitamins, minerals, and phytochemicals to protect the seedling plant's DNA from free radicals. No wonder they're so healthy. By seeds, using the formal definition, we're talking all whole grains; grains are seeds--you plant them and they grow. Nuts are just dry fruits with one or two seeds. Legumes (beans, peas, and lentils) are seeds, too, as are cocoa and coffee beans. So, finding health-promoting effects in something like cocoa or coffee should not be all that surprising. There is substantial evidence that increased consumption of all these little plants is associated with lower risk of cardiovascular disease.

Of course, much of chocolate research is just on how to get consumers to eat more. While it didn't seem to matter what kind of music people were listening to when it came to the flavor intensity, pleasantness, or texture of a bell pepper, people liked chocolate more when listening to jazz than classical, rock, or hip hop. Why is this important? So food industries can "integrate specific musical stimuli" in order to maximize their profits. For example, purveyors may play jazz in the background to increase consumers' acceptance of their chocolates. Along these lines, another study demonstrated that people rated the oyster eaten "more pleasant in the presence of the 'sound of the sea' than in the presence of 'farmyard noises.'"

You'd think chocolate would just sell itself, given that it's considered the most commonly craved food in the world. The same degree of interest doesn't seem to exist as to whether or not Brussels sprouts might provide similar cardiovascular protection. So, it's understandable to hope chocolate provides health benefits. Meanwhile, despite their known benefits, Brussels sprouts don't get the love they deserve.

One of the potential downsides of chocolate is weight gain, which is the subject of my Does Chocolate Cause Weight Gain? video. Though cocoa hardly has any calories, chocolate is one of the most calorie-dense foods. For example: A hundred calories of chocolate is less than a quarter of a bar, compared to a hundred calories of strawberries, which is more than two cups..

A few years ago, a study funded by the National Confectioners Association--an organization that, among other things, runs the website voteforcandy.com--reported that Americans who eat chocolate weigh, on average, four pounds less than those who don't. But maybe chocolate-eaters exercise more or eat more fruits and vegetables. The researchers didn't control for any of that.

The findings of a more recent study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine were less easy to dismiss and there were no apparent ties to Big Chocolate. The researchers reported that out of a thousand men and women they studied in San Diego, those who frequently consumed chocolate had a lower BMI--actually weighed less--than those who ate chocolate less often. And this was even after adjusting for physical activity and diet quality. But, it was a cross-sectional study, meaning a snapshot in time, so you can't prove cause and effect. Maybe not eating chocolate leads to being fatter, or maybe being fatter leads to not eating chocolate. Maybe people who are overweight are trying to cut down on sweets. What we need is a study in which people are followed over time.

There was no such prospective study, until now. More than 10,000 people were followed for six years, and a chocolate habit was associated with long-term weight gain in a dose-response manner. This means the greatest weight gain over time was seen in those with the highest frequency of chocolate intake. It appears the reason the cross-sectional studies found the opposite is that subjects diagnosed with obesity-related illnesses tended to reduce their intake of things like chocolate in an attempt to improve their prognosis. This explains why heavier people may, on average, eat less chocolate.

To bolster this finding came the strongest type of evidence--an interventional trial--in which you split people up into two groups and change half their diets. Indeed, adding four squares of chocolate to peoples' daily diets does appear to add a few pounds.

So, what do we tell our patients? In 2013, researchers wrote in the American Family Physician journal that "because many cocoa products are high in sugar and saturated fat, family physicians should refrain from recommending cocoa...." That's a little patronizing, though. You can get the benefits of chocolate without any sugar or fat by adding cocoa powder to a smoothie, for example. Too often, doctors think patients can't handle the truth. Case in point: If your patients inquire, one medical journal editorial suggest, ask them what type of chocolate they prefer. If they respond with milk chocolate, then it is best to answer that it is not good for them. If the answer is dark chocolate, then you can lay out the evidence.

When I used to teach medical students at Tufts, I gave a lecture about this amazing new therapeutic called "iloccor-B." I'd talk about all the new science, all the things it could do, its excellent safety profile. Just as they were all scrambling to buy stock in the company and prescribe it to all their patients, I'd do the big reveal. Apologizing for my "dyslexia," I would admit that I'd got it backwards. All this time I had been talking about broccoli.

The main active ingredient in broccoli is thought to be sulforaphane, which may protect our brains, protect our eyesight, protect our bodies against free radicals, boost our detoxification enzymes, and help prevent and treat cancer.

In my videos The Best Detox and Sometimes the Enzyme Myth is the Truth, I talked about how the formation of sulforaphane is like a chemical flare reaction, requiring the mixing of a precursor compound with an enzyme, which is destroyed by cooking. This may explain why we get dramatic suppression of cancer cell growth from raw broccoli, cauliflower and Brussels sprouts, but hardly anything from boiled, microwaved or steamed (except for microwaved broccoli, which actually retains some cancer fighting abilities). But who wants to eat raw Brussels sprouts?

There is a strategy to get the benefits of raw in cooked form. In raw broccoli, the sulforaphane precursor, called glucoraphanin, mixes with the enzyme (myrosinase) when you chew or chop it. If given enough time--such as when sitting in your upper stomach waiting to get digested--sulforaphane is born. The precursor and sulforaphane are resistant to heat and therefore cooking, but the enzyme is destroyed. No enzyme = no sulforaphane.

That's why I described the "hack and hold" technique--if we chop the broccoli, Brussels sprouts, kale, collards, or cauliflower first and then wait 40 minutes, we can cook them all we want. The sulforaphane is already made; the enzyme has already done its job, so we don't need it anymore.

When most people make broccoli soup, for example, they're doing it wrong. Most people cook the broccoli first, then blend it. We now know it should be done the exact opposite way. Blend it first, wait, and then cook it.

What if we're using frozen broccoli, though? In my video, Second Strategy to Cooking Broccoli, you can see the amount of sulforaphane in someone's body after they eat broccoli soup made from fresh broccoli versus from frozen broccoli. The difference is dramatic. Commercially produced frozen broccoli lacks the ability to form sulforaphane because vegetables are blanched (flash-cooked) before they're frozen for the very purpose of deactivating enzymes. This prolongs shelf life in the frozen foods section, but the myrosinase is dead by the time you take it out of your freezer. It doesn't matter how much you chop it, or how long you wait, no sulforaphane is going to be made. This may be why fresh kale suppresses cancer cell growth up to ten times more than frozen.

The frozen broccoli is still packed with the precursor--remember that's heat resistant--and we could get lots of sulforaphane out of the frozen broccoli by adding some outside enzyme. Where do we get myrosinase enzyme from? Researchers just buy theirs from a chemical company. But we can just walk into any grocery store.

All cruciferous vegetables have this myrosinase. Mustard greens, a cruciferous vegetable, grow out of little mustard seeds, which we can buy ground up in the spice aisle as mustard powder. If we sprinkled some mustard powder on our cooked frozen broccoli, would it start churning out sulforaphane? We didn't know...until now.

Boiling broccoli prevents the formation of any significant levels of sulforaphane due to inactivation of the enzyme. However, researchers from the University of Reading found that the addition of powdered mustard seeds to the heat processed broccoli significantly increased the formation of sulforaphane. In the video I mentioned earlier, Second Strategy to Cooking Broccoli, you can see the amount of sulforaphane in boiled broccoli versus the amount after half a teaspoon or a teaspoon of mustard powder is added. Both a half teaspoon and a full teaspoon increase sulforaphane by the same amount, suggesting that we could use even use less mustard powder for the same effect. Therefore, although domestic cooking leads to the deactivation of myrosinase and stops sulforaphane formation, the addition of powdered mustard seeds to cooked cabbage-family vegetables provides a natural source of the enzyme such that it's practically like eating them raw.

So, if we forget to chop our greens in the morning for the day, or are using frozen, we can just sprinkle some mustard powder on top at the dinner table and we're all set. Daikon radish, horseradish, or wasabi--all cruciferous vegetables packed with the enzyme--work as well. Just a quarter teaspoon of Daikon radish root for seven cups of broccoli worked--just a tiny pinch can do it. Or you can add a small amount of fresh greens to your cooked greens, because the fresh greens have myrosinase enzyme that can go to work on the cooked greens.

I love kitchen chemistry--it totally revolutionized my daily greens prep. One of the first things I used to do in the morning is chop my greens for the day, so when lunch and supper rolls around they'd be good to go. But now with the mustard powder plan, I don't have to pre-chop.

In my video Breast Cancer and Constipation, I discussed how fruits and veggies bind carcinogenic bile acids in our gut. Since bile acids are absorbed back into our systems, they may increase our risk of not only colon cancer but also other cancers as well. In light of this, researchers publishing in the journal, Nutrition Research, concluded that to "lower the risk of diet and lifestyle-related premature degenerative diseases and to advance human nutrition research, relative bile acid-binding potential of foods and fractions need to be evaluated."

They found that some vegetables bind bile acids better than others. We know that those eating more plant-based diets are at a lower risk of heart disease and cancer. This could partly be because of phytonutrients in plants that act as antioxidants and potent stimulators of natural detoxifying enzymes in our bodies. Veggies can also lower cholesterol and detoxify harmful metabolites, functions that can be predicted by their ability to bind bile acids.

A group of USDA researchers studying this topic discovered three important things. First, they found an over five-fold variability in bile acid binding among various vegetables that had similar fiber content, suggesting that bile acid binding is not just related to total dietary fiber content (as previously thought), but instead some combination of unique phytonutrients yet to be determined.

Second, they discovered that steaming significantly improves the bile acid binding of collards, kale, mustard greens, broccoli, peppers, cabbage, beets, eggplant, asparagus, carrots, green beans, and cauliflower, suggesting that in this way steaming vegetables may be more healthful than those consumed raw.

Finally, they ranked multiple vegetables for bile binding ability. Which vegetables kicked the most bile butt? (in my video, Which Vegetable Binds Bile Best?, you can see a visual comparison of bile binding ability.) Turnips turned up last. Then came cabbage, cauliflower, bell peppers, spinach, asparagus and green beans. Mustard greens and broccoli were better. Eggplant, carrots and Brussels sprouts basically tie for the #5 slot. Then collards at #4. Kale got the bronze, okra the silver, and beets the gold. Kale, surprisingly, got beet.

The researchers concluded that inclusion of all these vegetables in our daily diets should be encouraged. When consumed regularly, they concluded, these vegetables may lower the risk of premature degenerative diseases and improve public health.

It might seem that our skin is the first line of defense between our insides and the outside world, but our greatest interface with our environment is actually through the lining of our intestines, which covers thousands of square feet. And all that separates our gut from the outer world is a single layer of cells, 50 millionth of a meter thick - less than the thickness of a sheet of paper.

Compare that to our skin. In the video, The Broccoli Receptor: Our First Line of Defense, you can see a layer of skin, dozens of protective cells thick, to keep the outside world outside of our bodies. Why don't we have multiple layers in our gut wall? Because we need to absorb stuff from food into our body. It's a good idea for our skin to be waterproof, so we don't start leaking, but the lining of our gut has to allow for the absorption of fluids and nutrients.

With such a thin, fragile layer between our sterile core and outer chaos, we better have quite a defense system in place. Indeed, that's where "intraepithelial lymphocytes" come in.

Intraepithelial lymphocytes serve two functions: they condition and repair that thin barrier, and they provide a front-line defense against intestinal pathogens. These critical cells are covered with Ah receptors. Ah receptors are like locks, and for decades researchers have been searching for a natural key to fit in these locks to activate those receptors and sustain our immunity. We recently discovered a key: broccoli.

Cruciferous vegetables--broccoli, kale, cauliflower, cabbage, Brussels sprouts--contain a phytonutrient that is transformed by our stomach acid into the key that fits into the Ah receptor, stimulating our intraepithelial lymphocytes. In other words, broccoli leads to the activation of our immune foot soldiers.

In an editorial about Ah receptors and diet, researcher Lora V. Hooper from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute noted, "From childhood we learn that vegetables are good for us, and most of us eat our veggies without giving much thought to the evidence behind this accepted wisdom or to the mechanisms underlying the purported health-boosting properties of a vegetable-rich diet." But now we know that "specific dietary compounds found at high levels in cruciferous vegetables such as broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage are essential for sustaining intestinal immune function." Green vegetables are in fact required to maintain a large population of those protective intraepithelial lymphocytes.

Maybe that's why vegetable intake is associated with lower risk of inflammatory bowel diseases such as ulcerative colitis, whereas the more meaty Western diet is associated with higher risk of inflammatory bowel diseases. This may be because the activating receptors on our intestinal immune cells are basically sensors of plant-derived phytochemicals.

This raises a broader question: Why did our immune system evolve this requirement for broccoli and other plant foods? Well, when do we need to boost our intestinal defenses the most? When we eat! That's when we may be ingesting pathogens. Linking heightened intestinal immune activation to food intake could serve to bolster immunity precisely when it is needed. At the same time, this would allow energy to be conserved in times of food scarcity, since maintaining these defenses takes considerable amounts of energy. Why remain at red alert 24 hours a day when we eat only a couple of times a day? We evolved for millions of years eating mostly weeds--wild plants, dark green leafy vegetables (or as they were known back then, leaves). By using veggies as a signal to upkeep our immune system, our bodies may be bolstering our immune defenses when we most need them. Thus, the old recommendation to "eat your veggies" has a strong molecular basis. (Did we really evolve eating that many plant foods? See my video Paleolithic Lessons).

This discovery has been all exciting for the drug companies who are looking into Ah receptor active pharmaceuticals. "However," as one research team at Cambridge concluded, "rather than developing additional anti-inflammatory drugs, changing diets which are currently highly processed and low in vegetable content, may be a more cost effective way towards health and well-being."

As remarkable as this story is, it is just the tip of the cruciferous iceberg! See, for example:

Given the variety and flexibility of most mammalian diets, a specific dependence on cruciferous vegetables for optimal intestinal immune function would seem overly restrictive, no? I address that in my video, Counteracting the Effects of Dioxins

Wait a second. How were they able to get a group of older men to go vegan for a year? They home delivered prepared meals to their doors, I guess figuring men are so lazy they'll just eat whatever is put in front of them.

But what about out in the real world? Realizing that we can't even get most men with cancer to eat a measly five servings of fruits and veggies, in a study profiled in my video, Prostate Cancer Survival: The A/V Ratio, researchers settled on just trying to change their A to V ratio--the ratio of animal to vegetable proteins--and indeed were successful in cutting this ratio by at least half, from about two to one animal to plant, to kind of half vegan, one to one.

How'd the men do? Their cancer appeared to slow down. The average PSA doubling time (an estimate of how fast the tumor may be doubling in size) in the "half vegan" group slowed from 21 months to 58 months. So the cancer kept growing, but with a part-time plant-based diet they were able to slow down the tumor's expansion. What Ornish got, though, was an apparent reversal in cancer growth--the PSA didn't just rise slower, it trended down, which could be an indication of tumor shrinkage. So the ideal A to V ratio may be closer to zero.

If there's just no way grandpa's going vegan, and we just have half-measures, which might be the worst A and the best V? Eggs and poultry may be the worst, respectively doubling and potentially quadrupling the risk of cancer progression in a study out of Harvard. Twice the risk eating less than a single egg a day and up to quadruple the risk eating less than a single daily serving of chicken or turkey.

And if we could only add one thing to our diet, what would it be? Cruciferous vegetables. Less than a single serving a day of either broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, or kale may cut the risk of cancer progression (defined as the cancer coming back, spreading to the bone, or death) by more than half.

The animal to plant ratio might be useful for cancer prevention as well. For example, in the largest study ever performed on diet and bladder cancer, just a 3% increase in the consumption of animal protein was associated with a 15% higher risk of bladder cancer, whereas a 2% increase in plant protein intake was associated with a 23% lower risk. Even little changes in our diets can have significant effects.